The speed of the conversion of grass to dust is astonishingly fast. Inner Mongolia, China's third largest province, stretching 1,500 miles east to west and more than 600 miles north to south in some places, is larger than Texas and California combined. As recently as the 1960s, according to estimates by the Chinese environmental agency, almost three-quarters of Inner Mongolia was grass. The province's thin soil, 15 inches of rainfall annually, and nomadic herders supported one of the planet's most robust wild ranges, a grass ecosystem nearly twice as large as France.

No longer. According to estimates by the United Nations, since 1980 desert has claimed 2 million acres of cropland, nearly 6 million acres of rangeland, and 16 million acres of forests in northern China. Almost a quarter of China already is desert; 1.3 million square miles, equal to two Alaskas. The steady desertification of northern China has put the world's fastest growing economy, a nation of 1.3 billion people, at the frontline of the global freshwater crisis.

Indeed, the images of Inner Mongolia that Chen painted, galloping horses and moving herds, are largely gone, the result of ineffective and disputed policies to try to contain the spreading desert— what the government calls the "household responsibility system," and "enclosure policy." In essence, the Chinese government forced the nomadic herders and their grass-consuming animals to stop wandering.

Still, the desert and the sand storms are growing. Chen's goal is to help the nomadic herders he knows find solutions to the spreading sand. He believes herders have some answers, drawing on centuries of accumulated knowledge of the land and local conditions, and not on technical theories, many of them failed, mandated over the last four decades by Beijing. Shaking his head, "Who knows the grasslands better than the herders?" Chen asks.

There is little disagreement in China that changes in patterns of precipitation in an already parched region, leading to severe shortages of freshwater, plays an integral role in the spread of desertification. But agreeing on the underlying socioeconomic drivers and solving the problems have fostered divisions in the Chinese scientific community, and between the government and its people. The efforts to stabilize sand dunes, which have varied in their success, include aerial seeding, and planting a 74 million-acre "Great Green Wall" of trees, 2,800 miles long stretching from the northeast, through Inner Mongolia to Xinjiang in the far west. That is an arc of strategically located new forests that would reach from Boston to San Francisco.

Chinese officials also have responded with various, sometimes conflicting, policies. In 1994, China joined the newly formed UN Convention to Combat Desertification. Two years later it began to publish a series of management plans that, among other things, called for China to plant 95 million acres of grass, shrubs and trees to reduce desert conditions on 190 million acres of land by 2050.

Few are confident it will stabilize the land and Chen is especially skeptical. "The scientists fence off the grasslands to run their experiments, but that's not natural, and so it doesn't work in the real world."

Though conceding that Chinese scientists have made some progress, he bitterly recalled past policies, "They planted poplar trees everywhere! The grasslands didn't have any trees so how could they think that poplar trees were appropriate? Furthermore, practices that worked in one area were often taken as model practices to be implemented everywhere, regardless of whether the amount of rainfall or soil or climate were different!"

Other policies, some of them sources of intense disagreement, are meant to influence human behavior. None is more contentious than the "ecological migration" program, initiated in Inner Mongolia in 2001 that requires removing 640,000 Mongol, Kazakh, and Tibetan herders from the grasslands of Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet into towns and cities.

The forced movements, said the government, were intended to reduce pressure on the grasslands from overgrazing. But Mongols viewed the policy as discriminatory, a program designed to make water, minerals, and land more accessible to Han Chinese businesses and immigrants.

The relocation program has prompted frequent and sometimes violent protests. In April 2007, according to a Chinese television report, Mongolian villagers in the southern part of the province clashed with Chinese farmers who the government moved onto their lands. A Mongolian villager was beaten to death, and several others were arrested and jailed.

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